Ben Schott

“I’ve lived here for about 8 years, and Highgate’s a very lovely and charming place to live.  It’s leafy and green and very quiet, and not much happens.  I tend to get up at about 8 or 9, but work pretty much instantly, having made coffee, go back to bed and either read the papers in their physical state or increasingly now online. 

Something that wouldn’t really have been possible till probably 5 or 10 years ago, is the ability for someone like me to write and also typeset and design a book completely.  So from the idea of the book all the way through to writing it and doing the illustrations and drawing the graphs, and creating it as a look and a feel. And then entering the proof corrections, and actually then creating the PDF file that goes straight to the presses means that the author can be in charge of not only the words but also the absolute look and feel of the book all the way through the process, which is something that’s quite revolutionary and quite new and actually gives the author quite a lot of power, not only in the content but also the look and the style of the book. 

Writing an almanac means that you never really switch off, you’re always thinking about, you know, a story or what’s happening as you hear and as you read and as you watch things.  Although I can pretty much work anywhere, and I’ve worked in some very curious places, it’s nice to have somewhere where you can consider home and you can relax into and be surrounded by the curious objects that make up your collection, including probably the most curious which is this do-do, which was made for me by this fantastic artist called David Farrar, and it’s actually a wonderful do-do that’s been covered with pages from my books which have been published all around the world, so there’s French, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, even Japanese pages that cover this wonderful flightless bird. You just have to hope that it’s not too much of a metonym for the book trade, an extinct and flightless bird.”